2024 Election thread
Comments
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Fairly sure @Dorset_Boy suggested I copy some people he knows by living in the West Country and staying a night or two a week in London.
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He may have done but I think he probably also accepts that more building is needed. In the real world, even if the planning system gets fixed and NIMBYS get ignored we are decades away from catching up with the level that is needed. I still think that becoming less London centric is also a part of the mix and that employers need to think about what they can do. Ultimately they'll have a problem if their employees can't afford to live near work. It's rare that a major problem will get fixed through a single solution.
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Without wishing to drag this thread to the same place, but can you clarify how this differs from the avocado thread?
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Avocado thread is more me whining that, in addition to the housing problem, the oldies have been largely shielded from all of the problems in the last 10 years and it's at the expense of everyone else and it boils my p!ss they can't see it.
The benefit generation. Insist on handouts for everything, from free higher education, to outrageously expensive benefits, healthcare, social care, the lot. All because they once paid national insurance.
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Don’t blame you. TBH they all look the same sometimes. Easy to forget what thread I’m actually in. See this ⬆️ thread leakage, does my head in…
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Talking of 🧵👮♂️, where's @pinno when you need him, bringing order to chaos?
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Yes, thanks for hijacking that.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
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It's part of the problem. I was originally more aiming at the wider provision of housing and how the planning system (and in particular the 70-year-old land designation that has very little to do with greenness) have contrived to make it really very difficult to build anything in this country. Politicians usually want to shout about new business they've helped promote, but for some reason, the one business that *everyone* needs has become the thing that politicians campaign against to boost their popularity.
I'm also more interested in the thousands of people in temporary or wholly inadequate housing than the graduate lawyers and bankers who can't quite get their dream home before they're 30.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition1 -
You missed out recruitment consultants in the top percentage of earnings
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It's possible Sunak could wait too long
“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0 -
Unsurprisingly focusing all your media engagements on reducing immigration, whilst dolling out record numbers of visas isn't a vote winner.
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I reckon you can add most of those Reform votes to Conservative when it comes to election day though. I suspect many of them will bottle it if they stop and think what the likely consequence will be.
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People think about consequences when they vote? If only they'd done that when they voted for Brexit...
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I suspect they may realise that voting Reform will likely lead to a greater Labour majority but who knows? It would be amusing if Reform end up losing the Tories seats to Labour or Lib Dem after succumbing to giving the referendum due to the perceived risk of UKIP previously. Actually amusing doesn't feel like the right word, possibly ironic in that the Party is split more badly than ever when the intention was supposedly to heal the rifts.
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I often think back to the lead up to Brexit and think there were two key issues at stake:
1) Very few people on either side actually thought we were going to vote to leave and there was a staggering amount of apathy and indifference. I worked in a research institute at the time which looked at migration. We were asked to put on a public forum to discuss the issue. I was charged with inviting guest speakers, literally no MP for remain could be bothered to come. I found one leave MP, who was actually Labour. I assumed he had been up and down the country campaigning and attending events. When I asked his PA if this was the case the answer was "No, this is the first one". This was one week before the vote!
2) You make a really valid point about the consequences BT, but I think there was a deeper issue, that many people just had no clue what the consequences were. I think this was partly due to the lies told about the benefits which people bought into, and also because it was such a staggeringly complex issue that for anyone who may have been on the fence, or were trying to figure out what could happen, they were left floundering a bit.
I will always lay the majority of the blame at Cameron's door for calling the vote just to appease his own party. I fully believe in Democracy, but there are some things that are just too complex to be out to the public on a simple Yes or No vote.
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I have asked this question before as I am genuinely unsure. Will wider provision of housing and planning reform really address the issue? Surely economic inequality is the biggest barrier? Building housing is, of course, important, but if you are building housing that large percentages of the population cannot afford, does it solve the housing crisis?
I can't help feeling the more housing just leads to more people outbidding each other and pushing house prices even higher, creating an even wider gap.
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Assuming the houses are built where people want to live, more houses will eventually bring down the price - or at least, slow down the increase vs wages.
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Are the reform voters those in the red wall who have gone on the same journey as 30p Lee? In which case they aren't exactly going to feel lots of loyalty to the conservative party surely?
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It doesn't all need to be for open market sales. LAs and HAs need to build and upgrade to replace losses from right to buy.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition1 -
Even if all the barriers come down it is likely to take a long, long time for it to significantly move the needle on prices I suspect. I worked on a development that got permission for 2500 homes back in 2016. It's coming on quite well but I think only around half of the houses have been built so far.
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Anecdotally but I have at least seen that new builds are having to come down in price, or that developers are having to offer sweeteners to get them shifted.
It's going to take a long time to shift the dial, but hopefully things will start moving in the right direction. Or stop accelerating in the wrong direction!
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The second best time to start a long term project is today (or something like that). It will obviously take a while but that's not a reason to not start.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
I agree completely but Rick talks as though he thinks it is a silver bullet. I think it needs to be one, albeit large, part of a wider strategy and that the idea of moving the work also needs considering which seems to be something he is massively opposed to for some reason. It has worked to an extent where large public sector organisations have relocated e.g. BBC moving to Salford that in turn encouraged other parts of the media sector to move there.
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This tally's with my thoughts. I think it is an important point about encouraging people to explore new places to live. A lot of the focus is on building where people want to live but surely that is unrealistic, demand for the most desirable areas is never going to be met with sufficient supply. Don't the majority of us have to compromise slightly on our preferred location? I live in a nice area and have no complaints but would it be my number one choice (or even 2 or 3)? Not really, but I suspect like many of us I had to adjust expectations and balance area, house and affordability.
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TBH I think building houses where people want to live is easier than stimulating the economy effectively so that London isn't the only driver of growth for the whole country.
That would be preferable but that is even more unrealistic than building a lot of houses.
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Where do people want to live?
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Where do you want to live then?
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